The Serrano Connection (2 page)

"For the court, Peli, not for display!" It came out sharper than she intended, and he blinked in surprise.

"Oh. Right." She could practically see the little wheels flickering behind his eyes, calculating, remembering. "I don't really know; the only things I've seen were those cubes back in the Academy, in military law classes. And that was usually just the last day, the verdict. I don't know if they wore dress the whole time."

"The thing is," Esmay said, "if we need new uniforms made, we have to have time for it." Officers' dress uniforms, unlike regular duty uniforms, were handmade by licensed tailors. She did not want to appear before a court in something non-regulation.

"Good point. There wasn't much left of the stuff in that compartment, so we have to assume that all our dress uniforms were damaged." He looked up at her. "You'll have to ask about it, Esmay; you're still the senior."

"Not any more." Even as she said it, she knew she was, for this purpose. Peli didn't quite sneer, but he didn't offer to help out, either.

"On this, you are the one. Sorry, Es', but you have to."

Asking about the uniforms brought her to the notice of the paper-pushers again. As captain—even for those few days—she had the responsibility to sign off on all the innumerable forms required.

"Not the death letters," Lieutenant Commander Hosri said. "The admiral felt that the families would prefer to have those signed by a more senior officer who could better explain the circumstances." Esmay had completely forgotten that duty: the captain must write to the family of any crew members who died while assigned to the ship. She felt herself blushing. "And there are other major reports which the admiral feels should be deferred until Forensics has completed its examination. But you left a lot of routine stuff undone, Suiza."

"Yes, sir," Esmay said, her heart sinking again. When could she have done it? How could she have known? The excuses raced through her mind and out again: no excuses were enough.

"Have your officers fill out these forms—" he handed her a sheaf of them. "Turn them in, completed and countersigned by you, within forty-eight hours, and I'll forward them to the admiral's staff for approval. If approved, that will authorize officers to arrange for replacements of uniforms—and yes, that will include Fleet authorization to forward measurements to registered tailors, so they can get started. Now, we need to deal with the basic reports that
should
have been filed, or ready to file, at the time when you were relieved of command of
Despite
."

The junior officers were not delighted with the forms; some of them procrastinated, and Esmay found herself having to nag them to finish the paperwork by the deadline. "None too early," grunted Hosri's senior clerk, when Esmay brought the reports in. He glanced at the clock. "What'd you do, wait until the last minute?"

She said nothing; she didn't like this clerk, and she had had to work with him for two straight shifts on the incomplete reports Hosri thought she should do. Just let it be over with, she told herself, even though she knew that the reports were the least of her problems. While she worked on those, the other young officers faced daily sessions with investigators determined to find out exactly how it was that a R.S.S. patrol ship had been captained by a traitor, and then embroiled in mutiny. Her turn would come next.

Forensics had swarmed over the
Despite
, stripping the records from the automatic surveillance equipment, searching every compartment, questioning every survivor, examining all the bodies in the ship's morgue. Esmay could only imagine that search, from the questions they asked each day. First with no visual cues at all, when they asked her to explain, moment by moment, where she had been and what she had seen, heard, and done when Captain Hearne took the ship away from Xavier. Later, with a 3-D display of the ship, they led her through it again. Exactly where had she been? Facing which way? When she said she saw Captain Hearne the last time, where was Hearne, and what had she been doing?

Esmay had never been good at this sort of thing. She found out quickly that she had apparently perjured herself already: she could not, from where she remembered she'd been sitting, have seen Lt. Commander Forrester come out of the cross-corridor the way she'd said. It was, the interrogator pointed out, physically impossible to see around corners without special instruments. Had she had any? No. But her specialty had been scan. Was she sure she had not rigged something up? And again here—lines of her earlier testimony moved down the monitor alongside the image of the ship. Could she explain how she had gotten from her own quarters back
here
all the way forward and down two decks in only fifteen seconds? Because there was a clear picture of her—she recognized herself with familiar distaste—in the access corridor to the forward portside battery at 18:30:15, when she had insisted she was in her own quarters for the 18:30 duty report.

Esmay had no idea, and said so. She had made a habit of being in her quarters for that duty report; it had meant that she didn't have to linger in the junior officers' wardroom and join the day's gossip, or make her report with the others. Surely she would have done so even more readily with the rumors then sweeping the ship. She didn't like rumors; rumors got you in trouble. People fought over rumors and then were in more trouble. She hadn't known that Captain Hearne was a traitor—of course she hadn't—but she had had an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she had tried not to think about it.

Not until she'd been dragged through it again did she remember that someone had paged her and told her to come initial the daily scan log of the warhead lockers. Checking the automatic scans had been part of her daily routine. She'd insisted that she had done it, and whoever it was had insisted she hadn't, and finally she'd gone down to see. Who had called her? She didn't remember. And what had she found when she got there?

"I'd made an error entering the scan code," Esmay said. "At least—I guess that's what it was."

"What do you mean?" This interrogator had the most neutral voice Esmay had ever heard; it made her nervous for reasons she could not define.

"Well . . . the number was wrong. Sometimes that happened. But usually it wouldn't enter; it would signal a conflict."

"Explain, please."

Esmay struggled on, caught between the social desire not to bore the listener, and the innocent's need to explain fully why she wasn't guilty. She had entered, during her rotation, thousands of scan log codes. Sometimes she made mistakes; everyone did. She did not say, what she had long thought, which was how silly it was to have officers entering codes by hand, when there were perfectly decent, inexpensive code readers which could enter them directly. When she made a mistake, the coder usually locked up, refusing entry. But occasionally, it would accept the error code, only to hang up when the next shift compared its code to hers.

"Then they'd call me, and I'd have to come myself and reset the code, and initial the change. That must be what happened."

"I see." A pause during which she could feel the sweat springing out on her neck. "And from what station did you make the 1830 report, then?"

She had no idea. Going from her quarters—she could see the route clearly in her mind, but she could not remember calling in. Yet if she hadn't, someone would have logged it . . . except that was when, up on the bridge, the mutineers made their move against Captain Hearne. Sometime around then, anyway.

"I don't know that I did," she said. "I don't remember that I didn't. I got to the weapons bay, reset the codes, initialed them, and came back to my quarters, and then—" By then the mutiny had spread beyond the bridge, and the senior mutineers had sent someone down to keep the juniors out of it if they could. That hadn't worked; there had been more traitors than that.

The investigator nodded shortly, and went on to something else. To a series of somethings else. Finally, over many sessions, they worked their way up to the time when she herself was in charge.

Could she explain her decision to return to Xavier system and try to fight a battle against odds, with no senior officers and substantial casualties?

Only briefly, and obliquely, had she allowed herself to think of her decision as heroic. Reality wouldn't let her dwell on it. She hadn't known what she was doing; her inexperience had caused too many deaths. Even though it came out all right in the end, in one way, it was not all right for those who had died.

If it wasn't heroic, what was it? It looked stupid now, foolhardy. Yet . . . her crew, despite her inexperience, had blown away the enemy flagship.

"I . . . remembered Commander Serrano," she said. "I had to come back. After sending a message, so in case—"

"Gallant, but hardly practical," said this interrogator, whose voice had a twang she associated with central Familias planets. "You are a protÈgÈe of Commander Serrano?"

"No." She dared not claim that; they had served on the same ship only once, and had not been friends. She explained, to someone who surely knew better than she, how wide the gap between a raw ensign of provincial background, and a major rising on the twin plumes of ability and family.

"Not a . . . er . . . particular friend?" This with a meaningful smirk.

Esmay barely kept herself from snorting. What did he think she was, some prude off a back-country planet that didn't know one sex from the other? That could not call things by their right names? She put out of mind her aunt, who certainly would never use the terms common in the Fleet.

"No. We were not lovers. We were not friends. She was a major, command track; I was an ensign, technical track. It's just that she was polite—"

"Others weren't?" In the same tone.

"Not always," Esmay said, before she could stop herself. Too late now; she might as well complete the portrait of a provincial idiot. "I'm not from a Fleet family. I'm from Altiplano—the first person from Altiplano to attend the Academy. Some people thought it was a hoot." Too late again, she remembered that expression's Fleet meaning. "A regrettably laughable imposition," she added, to the raised eyebrows. "In our slang." Which was no stranger than Fleet slang, just someone else's. Which was the point: Heris Serrano had never laughed at it. But she wouldn't say that to those eyebrows, which right now made her wonder which great Fleet family she had just insulted.

"Altiplano. Yes." The eyebrows had come down, but the tone of condescension hadn't. "That is a planet where the Ageist influence is particularly strong, isn't it?"

"Ageists?" Esmay scrambled through what she knew of politics at home—she had not been home since she was sixteen—and came up with nothing. "I don't think anyone in Altiplano hates old people."

"No, no," the man said. "
Ageists
—surely you know. They oppose rejuvenation."

Esmay stared at him, now thoroughly confused. "Oppose rejuvenation? Why?" Not her relatives, who would be only too happy if Papa Stefan lived forever; he was the only one who could keep Sanni and Berthol from each other's throats, and those two were essential.

"How closely do you follow events on Altiplano?" the man asked.

"I don't," Esmay said. She had left it behind gladly; she had discarded without watching the newscube subscription her family sent her. She had finally decided, in the bleak aftermath of a nightmare in which she was not only stripped of her commission but sentenced to a term of hard labor, that she would never go back to Altiplano, no matter what. They could throw her out of Fleet, but they couldn't make her go home. She had looked it up: no judicial action could force someone to return to their planet of origin for crimes committed somewhere else. "And I can't believe they really oppose rejuvenation . . . at least, I can't imagine anyone I know thinking that way."

"Oh?"

Since he seemed interested, the first person in years who had shown any interest at all, Esmay found herself telling him about Papa Stefan, Sanni, Berthol, and the rest, at least insofar as it bore on their likely attitude towards rejuv. When she slowed down, he interrupted.

"And is your family . . . er . . . prominent on Altiplano?"

Surely that was in her file. "My father's a regional commander in the militia," she said. "The ranks aren't equivalent, but there are only four regional commanders on Altiplano." It would be the height of bad manners to say more; if he couldn't figure out from that where she stood socially on her home planet, then he'd have to suffer in ignorance.

"And you chose to go into Fleet? Why?"

That again. She had dealt with that in her first application, and during the entrance interviews and the military psychology classes as well. She rattled off the explanation that had always seemed to go best, and it sank into the investigator's unresponsive gaze.

"Is that all?"

"Well . . . yes." The smart young officer did not talk about wish fulfillment, the hours she'd spent in the manor orchard staring up at the stars and promising herself she'd be there someday. Better to be matter-of-fact, practical, sensible. No one wanted wild-eyed dreamers, fanatics. Especially not from worlds that had only a couple of centuries of human colonization.